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The importance of the environmental agenda has been rising exponentially in recent years. Firms face mounting pressure from multiple stakeholder groups to respond to environmental concerns. In a quest for ‘greener’ businesses, many companies increasingly rely on inter-firm strategic partnerships. Despite growing popularity among practitioners, green partnerships still remain a poorly understood phenomenon. The questions of how value is created in green partnerships, what factors drive their performance and what short-term and long-term implications of green partnerships are, still wait to be explored. In this dissertation, the topic of value creation in green strategic partnerships is analyzed in a two-step project. Study 1 examines the financial outcomes of inter-firm green strategies by exploring variations in stock market valuation of green strategic partnerships across multiple industries and functional domains. Study 2 focuses on the innovation-related outcomes by examining firm green patenting activities in the context of inter-firm networks in the chemical industry. Three complementary theoretical perspectives are utilized: corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature, organizational capabilities and social networks analysis. Data is collected based on extensive archival search of multiple sources. The major insight from this dissertation is that green strategic partnerships can be instrumental in unlocking value creation potential of a firm, but this phenomenon does not always happen and not for every firm. Financial implications of green partnerships vary depending on the functional domain of a partnership, a history of a firm’s environmental performance and the environmental profile of the industry. Green technology partnerships indeed enhance firm green innovation, as reflected in a greater number of successful green patent applications, but they do so at the level of firm networks, not at the level of the industry network. The properties of knowledge resources such as breadth of knowledge pool, knowledge compatibility, and knowledge specificity (green versus non-green), accumulated in a firm network do affect firm propensity to achieve green innovation. The structural properties of networks influence firm green innovation only at the firm network level. More specifically firm network density is positively related to firm green innovation. At the industry network level, however, none of the explored structural properties such as global network reach, global network clustering, and global network transitivity, have any impact on firm green innovation.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Pujari, Devashish, Business Administration.

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This dissertation takes a sharp methodological turn from prior research on religiousness, spirituality, and culture in organizations by making advances in the study of the structure and role of workplace religio-spiritual beliefs, combining a critical review, theory building, and two empirical sections. The research is based on the premise that the study of individual psychology has yet to address the cross-cultural and domain-specific nature of religio-spiritual beliefs that come to mind naturally in everyday work situations. First, after a case is made for the study of religio-spiritual beliefs, a critical review of the literature provides a comparison of 90 content-based measurement models, and is followed by implications for improving future measurement and research. Second, a conceptual discussion recommends a way forward for a domain-specific conceptualization of religiousness and spirituality and sets a framework for improving methodology, drawing from grounded theory, integral theory, and sense-making methodology. Third, a bottom-up exploration of the religio-spiritual beliefs induced by a variety of workplace situations is conducted through interviews of informants from six major faith traditions, plus the spiritual-but-not-religious. From the analysis, workplace situations, associated beliefs, and mental modules are structured according to the four quadrants of the Workplace Integral Model, each quadrant typified by a different workplace-grounded existential dilemma. Fourth, a higher level of religio-spiritual cognition is accessed through a sense-making methodology, revealing why and how work-related thoughts, self-concepts, and experiences become imbued with religio-spiritual significance, as illustrated in eight modes arranged on a Religio-Spiritual Sense-Making Circumplex. It is hoped that these findings can help set a foundation for future progress with research methods, measurement models, and theory building focused on the religio-spiritual thoughts of a diversity of people in the workplace.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Hackett, Rick D., Business.

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This dissertation will investigate how Product Performance Contracts are organized in Multi Component Systems contexts that proliferate contemporary OEM industries. The last two decades have seen a big change in both practice as well as the product engineering technologies that form the ecosystem within which suppliers and buyers negotiate the scale and scope of their transaction contracts. While we have seen the focus of industrial procurement move from specifications based contracts to performance based contracts, we are also witnessing a burgeoning technological capability that allows remote monitoring of product performance. These capabilities are part of the interconnectivity driving the much-touted Internet of Things (IoT) technology and at the heart of the Industrial Big Data ecosystem. The dissertation will attempt to explain three major phenomena in the industrial buyer and seller relationship in the context of Multi Component System Industries. First, we uncover the factors that explain the choice of product performance contract specificity between the OEM and suppliers. We first set up an analytical model to explain the notion of an optimal contract specificity level and predict and further empirically test the role of different factors in the choice of contract specificity. We find that while the technology uncertainty decreases the level of optimal contract specificity, OEM’s transaction specific investment, unconstrained mixing-and-matching of branded component, and extent of product monitoring technology increases the level of optimal contract specificity. Second, we provide empirical evidence that any deviation from optimal contract specificity erodes value in the form of an increase in total transaction cost. In our transaction cost efficiency model, we also illustrate with a precise granularity that under-specified contracts lead to more ex-post dispute costs, and over-specified contracts lead to more ex-post contract monitoring cost and ex-ante contract writing cost. Third, we investigate how contracts, investments in strategic capabilities such as monitoring technology, the overall firm strategy, and transaction costs determine the firm performance. We find that not every transaction cost is a dead weight loss in terms of product performance. Most notably we find that ex-post dispute costs are associated with higher product performance when there is a major incident such as component failure between the OEM and the supplier. Methodologically, this dissertation proposes to use a combination of field work, mathematical modeling, conceptual theory building, and empirical analysis of primary data about firm practices.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Ray, Sourav, Business.

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We propose a classification framework for the operations management literature that has looked at pricing and ordering in supply chains when supply and/or demand are uncertain. We then focus on developing three new models for managing supply and demand uncertainties in supply chains. In the first model, we study a two period sourcing problem of a firm under two sets of contracts. The contracts differ in terms of acquisition costs and the level of risk that they impose on the firm. We provide the conditions where the optimum solution is unique and also explore the behaviour of the optimum solution analytically and numerically. One application of our model is in the agribusiness supply chain and we provide numerical examples based on data from the almond industry in California. In the second model we look at a joint ordering, pricing and capacity planning problem. We characterize the optimum policy both in single and multi-period cases. In addition, we study the impact of fixed production costs on the optimum policy. The third model is devoted to coordination between a buyer and a supplier where there is a possibility of improving the supplier by both players. We analyze the problem under a Stackelberg game setting where the buyer is the leader. We show that the buyer either tries to amplify the investment of the supplier by order inflation or assumes all the investment costs. We investigate the behaviour of the optimum solution under different strategies.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Hassini, Elkafi, Business.

▼ Recent years have witnessed a growing concern for individuals’ abilities to effectively manage work and family. Employees are demanding balance between work and personal life and employers, who are interested in attracting and retaining talent, are looking for ways to respond. One way employers are responding is by implementing work-family initiatives and encouraging a family-supportive culture. In this thesis, I investigate the relationship of such resources (family-supportive organizational perceptions-FSOP and perceptions of implementation of work-family initiatives) and contextual demands (role overload) with the work-family interface (work-to-family conflict and enrichment). In response to research calls to highlight the role of the individual in shaping the relationships between work and family experiences, I introduce the construct and measure of balance self-efficacy. I define balance self-efficacy as one’s beliefs about one’s own ability to manage resources, demands, and stakeholders from the work and family domains. I argue that balance self-efficacy mediates the relationships between resources and demands from one side and the work-family interface from the other side. I draw on the Conservation of Resources Theory and the Work-Home Resource Model to propose that balance self-efficacy is a personal resource that enables the individual to perceive less conflict and more enrichment between work and family. I propose that balance self-efficacy is largely drawn from the individual’s perception of his or her context. Hypotheses were tested in a sample of 420 participants employed at a financial institution in the United Arab Emirates. Hypotheses were tested using multiple regression and Bootstrapping techniques using PROCESS by Preacher and Hayes (2008). The results show that the individual’s cognitive assessment of their own ability to manage work and family (balance self-efficacy) relates negatively to work-to-family conflict and positively to work-to-family enrichment, thus suggesting that balance self-efficacy is not only a resilience resource that employees refer to in moments of conflict but also an enriching resource that allows the individual to view participation in the work domain as beneficial for participation in the family domain. Results also suggest that the employee’s perception of the messages emitted by the organization in the form of perceptions of family supportiveness and perceptions of implementation of work-family initiatives relate positively to an increased sense of balance self-efficacy. Contextual demands, in the form of role overload, relate negatively to balance self-efficacy. This thesis aims to contribute to the resource-view of the work-family interface and highlight personal agency in determining perceptions of conflict and enrichment between work and family. It does so by focusing on the individual’s assessment of their beliefs in their own ability to manage work and family and the role of organizational context in determining that sense of efficacy. By doing so, the… Advisors/Committee Members: Connelly, Catherine, Business.

▼ This thesis explores three important topics spanning international asset pricing, empirical capital structure, U.S. politics, and corporate law: relationship-specific investment (RSI), contracting environment and financial performance; RSI, contracting environment and the choice of capital structure; and political value and SEC enforcement actions. Firms that engage in long-term bilateral relationships with their buyers or suppliers are usually required to make relationship-specific investments. We examine how the values of these long-term specific investments are affected by the quality of governmental contract enforcement. We find that firms in relationship-specific industries have higher valuations, measured by Tobin’s Q, when their countries of origin are able to strongly enforce contractual agreements. Our finding is robust to a variety of empirical specifications and regression methods. We also show that as legal quality improves, firms with relationship-specific investments exhibit lower operating performance, presumably due to risk or in order to motivate further investments from their stakeholders. Further analysis of the cross-section of stock returns supports a risk-based explanation. Firms in long-term bilateral relationships with their customers or suppliers are required to make relationship-specific investments in the form of physical equipment, human resources, specific production sites, or brand names. These dedicated assets are usually tied to a particular use or relationship and cannot be redeployed if the firm is liquidated. In the absence of legal enforcement, firms are required to limit their use of debt financing and, consequently, signal a reduced default risk to encourage investment by their contracting parties. Using a sample of 143,278 firm-year observations, and measures of industry-level relationship-specificity and the quality of legal enforcement across 57 countries, we find strong evidence that good quality contract enforcement mitigates the negative association between relationship-specificity and debt financing. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plays a central role in investigating potential violations of securities laws and initiating enforcement actions in the United States. We examine the association between political culture and political connections and the penalties imposed at the end of SEC enforcement actions. Our analysis is based on two key ideas. First, the political culture of a firm indicates its ethical boundaries and explains the propensity of misconduct across different domains, such as securities laws. Second, political connections signal a firm’s willingness to challenge SEC’s enforcement decisions. We find that the individual defendants associated with Republican firms are less likely to receive a bar or suspension penalty. This finding supports the notion that Republican managers are less likely to commit securities fraud since the Republican ideology stresses market discipline. Moreover, in line with prior research, our results show that political… Advisors/Committee Members: Chamberlain, Trevor, Business.

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This dissertation contains three essays on the predictability of asset returns and its implications. All essays contain tests and applications that could be implemented in real time, and a summary of economic and statistical significance. The dissertation as a whole adds to the growing literature that returns can be predictable, enough so to provide economically significant differences in returns. The same applies to predicting market returns, or market timing. The first essay modifies a popular measure of investor sentiment (Baker and Wurgler, 2006) with the idea in mind that market-wide sentiment will partially reverse itself in the next period. Economic fundamentals are removed to provide a more pure measure of sentiment, which is found to predict returns better (with sentiment having a negative relationship with market returns), resulting in a better investment strategy. The second essay implements a statistical methodology which allows many predictors (portfolio returns) to be aggregated into a composite index. This index predicts returns well, and also gives insight into why two well-observed stock market anomalies, size and value premiums, may occur: they predict future market returns and are therefore an ICAPM state variable that reflects future wealth opportunities. For this reason they carry a risk premium. The third essay provides a new forecasting approach that imposes the restrictions of the popular arbitrage pricing theory (APT) on an existing statistical approach (principal components analysis). The result is that the expected returns of asset positions hedged against systematic risk are better estimated, and average error is greatly reduced out-of-sample.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Balvers, Ron, Business Administration.

▼ This thesis aims to develop a deeper understanding of entrepreneurship education as a type of entrepreneurship support. We study the overall entrepreneurship support systems, the pedagogical models developed for students with different level of entrepreneurship experience, and the long-term influences of entrepreneurship education on students. Entrepreneurship education and training has become very popular in universities, colleges, and business development centers world-wide, and has been of great interest in academia also. However, the entrepreneurship teaching is usually not informed by solid theories, and students’ different learning needs are not taken into consideration. In addition, the long-term influences of entrepreneurship education on students are unclear. This thesis consists of four manuscripts, each of which is a co-authored paper that presents an individual study. Study 1 is a comprehensive literature review of 122 journal articles that disentangles multiple conceptualizations used to research entrepreneurship support and examines the effectiveness of each source and type of support. We present our theorizations found and explore how three prevailing management theories could motivate theoretical refinements in the field. We also identify areas for future research and offer guidance on how to improve the relevance of entrepreneurship support studies. Study 2 develop a set of conceptual models anchored in learning theory regarding how entrepreneurship education should be taught to students. These conceptual models are built on the techniques of entrepreneurship pedagogy such as experiential learning. They are developed for three groups of students: students without any entrepreneurship experience, students with previous entrepreneurship experience, and students who are currently running their start-ups. A set of potential variables that could be used for course evaluation purposes is also included. Choosing a model pertinent to students’ attributes, lecturers could hence design entrepreneurship courses suitable for the students. This study also provides novel insights into educators’ design of entrepreneurship programs. Study 3 is an approximately four-year quantitative longitudinal study examining the stability of students’ attitude, perceived behavior control, subjective norm, and intention to entrepreneurship over time, and the role of entrepreneurship education in this process. Findings have implications for interpreting extant entrepreneurial literature, and policy and practice related to nascent entrepreneurship development and support. The results support our argument that the theoretical and practical value of entrepreneurship literature should hinge on the temporal stability of the attitudinal and intentional constructs used. Study 4 is a qualitative study exploring what are the important knowledge/skills students learned from the entrepreneurship courses they took on average five years previously, which pedagogical approach seems most effective, whether the courses are… Advisors/Committee Members: Honig, Benson, Business Administration.

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Paramedicine in Canada and throughout the developed world is currently undergoing unprecedented transformation to its service delivery model, largely driven by the need to relieve healthcare systems from overcrowding, and ensure its availability for all citizens. These changes are facilitated by the ability of paramedic services to adopt a number of innovative technologies, and their ability to respond by adopting new service delivery models, which may entail the deployment of paramedics in various non-emergency roles or integration with other healthcare services. The purpose of this dissertation is to determine how paramedic services innovate, and how that innovation is influenced by technology in particular. To fulfill this purpose, a two-phase sequential explanatory mixed-methods study is conducted, with a quantitative phase followed by a qualitative phase. In the first phase a multilevel theoretical model consisting of constructs that measure Service Innovation Performance, Dynamic Capabilities, Information Technology (IT) Capabilities and Group-Level Healthcare Informatics Competencies was evaluated with WarpPLS 5.0. A dataset with participation from paramedic leaders of Canadian land-based paramedic services (n=43) and paramedics employed at these services (n=502) was used for this purpose. Findings from this phase indicate that the information technology related knowledge and skills possessed by paramedics have an impact on various organization level dynamic capabilities, as do various IT Capabilities that focus on the relationship between the paramedic service leadership and the IT service provider. In the second phase, a qualitative approach was taken to explore contextual and other factors that facilitate or inhibit the ability of a paramedic service to innovate. Results from this phase suggest that Canadian paramedic services primarily undertake innovative activities with a strong focus on assuring and improving patient care. The use of an electronic patient care record (ePCR) is an important resource, as it enables activities such as the improvement of the clinical skills of paramedics, as well as facilitates the generation of business cases for equipment investment. Further, the informatics competencies of paramedics greatly facilitate the adoption of technology and equipment by individual services, as paramedics with a high amount of these competencies assist other paramedics when adopting technology, communicate innovative ideas within a service, and identify areas in need of change. The results of this dissertation underline the value of technology-related knowledge and skills for paramedics, and the importance of technology in ensuring that paramedic services provide a high and continually improving standard of patient care.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Paramedicine in Canada is currently undergoing unprecedented transformation. These changes are driven by the need to relieve emergency healthcare resources from overcrowding, the increase in number of innovative technologies adopted…

Advisors/Committee Members: Tan, Joseph, Business Administration.

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This thesis proposes several new and useful financial econometric tools to facilitate risk analysis, portfolio choice and forecasting. This thesis starts with an introduction in Chapter 1. The research background, motivation and the structure of the thesis are illustrated in this chapter. Chapter 2 proposes a class of models that jointly model returns and ex-post variance measures under a Markov switching framework. Both univariate and multivariate return versions of the model are introduced. Estimation can be conducted under a fixed dimension state space or an infinite one. The proposed models can be seen as nonlinear common factor models subject to Markov switching and are able to exploit the information content in both returns and ex-post volatility measures. Applications to equity returns compare the proposed models to existing alternatives. The empirical results show that the joint models improve density forecasts for returns and point predictions of return variance. Using the information in ex-post volatility measures can increase the precision of parameter estimates, sharpen the inference on the latent state variable and improve portfolio decisions. Chapter 3 offers a new exact finite sample approach to estimating ex-post variance using Bayesian nonparametric methods. Until now ex-post variance estimation has been based on infill asymptotic assumptions that exploit high-frequency data. In contrast to the classical counterpart, the proposed method exploits pooling over high frequency observations with similar variances. Bayesian nonparametric variance estimators under no noise, heteroskedastic and serially correlated microstructure noise are introduced and discussed. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the proposed approach can increase the accuracy of variance estimation. Applications to equity data and comparison with realized variance and realized kernel estimators are included. Chapter 4 extends the third chapter to estimate the ex-post covariance matrix of asset returns from high-frequency data. As before, pooling is used to improve estimation accuracy and the method does not rely on infill asymptotic assumptions. In addition, the proposed covariance estimator is guaranteed to be positive definite. Furthermore, a new synchronization method of observations based on data augmentation is introduced. The Bayesian estimator is made robust to independent microstructure noise and nonsynchronous trading. According to Monte Carlo simulations, the new estimator is very competitive with existing estimators. Empirical applications evaluate the new estimator from an economic perspective. Finally, Chapter 5 concludes and summarizes the contribution of this thesis to the literature.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Maheu, John, Business.

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This thesis examines decision optimization of product recalls. Product recalls in recent years have shown unprecedented impact on both immediate economic and reputational damage to the company and long-lasting impact on the brand and industry. Admittedly, imperfect product quality makes recalls inevitable. Thus, we explore from three perspectives to elicit business insights regarding better management and risk control. Chapter 1 introduces the topic of product recall management optimization and its real-world motivation. Chapter 2 views the decision making of "when to initiate a product recall" as a dynamic process and takes the feedback of customer returns to update the product defect rate. Updating is simplified by the conjugate properties of beta distribution and Bernoulli trials. We develop the optimal stopping model to find the thresholds of total product returns above which initiating recall is optimal. We implement dynamic programming to solve the model optimally. For large-size problems, we propose a simulation method to balance computation time with solution quality. Chapter 3 allows the company to control the recall risk by investing in quality. We adopt the one-stage stochastic newsvendor model and add quality-dependent recall risk. The resulting model is not concave in production quantity and quality levels. The parametric analysis reveals several interesting features such as the optimal ordering quantity and quality level have a conflicting relationship. We further extend our model from internal supply to external supply from multiple sources. Chapter 4 examines managing product recalls from the closed-loop supply chain management and disruption management perspectives. We model the location and allocation decisions of both manufacturing plants and reprocessing facilities where facilities are built after the recalls. Numerical experiments show the costs of overlooking potential recalls vary greatly, indicating the necessity of considering recalls in initial designs and the importance of accurate recall probability prediction. Chapter 5 summarizes.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Parlar, Mahmut, Business.

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This dissertation contains three essays on the non-pecuniary preferences pertaining to financial asset characteristics and their implications for asset pricing. The first essay considers the pricing implications of screens adopted by socially responsible investors. A model including such investors reconciles the empirically observed risk-adjusted sin-stock abnormal return with a systematic “boycott risk premium” which has a substantial financial impact that is, however, not limited to the targeted firms. The boycott effect cannot be displaced by litigation risk, a neglect effect, and liquidity considerations, or by industry momentum and concentration. The boycott risk factor is valuable in explaining cross-sectional differences in mean returns across industries and its premium varies directly with the relative wealth of socially responsible investors and with the business cycle. The second essay generalizes Fama (1996)’s concept of Multi-Factor Efficiency without being limited by additional random state variables that must affect future investment opportunities. Incorporating non-pecuniary preferences into a representative investor’s utility function generates multi-factor pricing implications. A representative investor chooses among expected returns, variances, and levels of characteristics according to their taste, which gives rise to an N-fund separation theorem with static characteristics. If a portfolio is built to maximize the exposure to the asset characteristics, the covariance between asset returns and this portfolio returns will be identical to the underlying characteristics. Such identity makes obsolete any attempts to distinguish between characteristics and risk exposures as the driving forces behind the cross-sectional variation in stock returns. The third essay develops a procedure for deriving systematic factors from characteristics, based on maximizing each factor’s exposure to a characteristic subject to a given level of factor variance. The resulting characteristic-mimicking portfolios (CMP) price mean asset returns identically as the original characteristics, irrespective of the underlying model. Accordingly, differences in the performance of mimicking factors and characteristics in explaining mean returns should be interpreted as an artifact of arbitrary procedural choices for generating mimicking factors. Factors and characteristics may be distinguished usefully only by determining if CMPs have significant explanatory power for the time series of returns.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Balvers, Ronald, Business.

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This thesis investigates three important issues on bank financial reporting quality: 1) the impact of banks’ retail versus wholesale funding structure on their earnings quality, 2) the implications of economic and monetary policy uncertainty for banks’ earnings opacity, and 3) the relationship between banks’ bad time history and accounting conservatism. In the first essay, we examine the implications of banks’ funding strategies for banks’ earnings quality. We find that banks’ greater reliance on retail deposits over wholesale funds is negatively and significantly associated with the magnitude of earnings management through discretionary loan loss provisions, the likelihood of meeting-or-beating earnings benchmark, and the extent of income smoothing through loan loss provisions. This finding is consistent with the arguments that retail deposits are relatively more stable and information-insensitive, represent a more conservative business model, and attract more intensive monitoring from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) than wholesale funds, thereby improving banks’ financial reporting quality. In the second essay, we investigate whether economic and monetary policy uncertainties affect banks’ earnings opacity. When economic and monetary policies are relatively uncertain, it is easier for bank managers to distort financial information, as unpredictable policy changes make assessing the existence and impact of hidden “adverse news” more difficult for investors and creditors. Policy uncertainty also increases the fluctuation in banks’ earnings and cash flows, providing additional incentives for bank managers to engage in earnings management. Our results show that uncertainty in economic and monetary policy is associated with greater magnitude of discretionary loan loss provisions, higher likelihood of just meeting-or-beating the prior year’s earnings, and lower levels of accounting conservatism, suggesting that economic and monetary policy uncertainties lead to higher banks’ earnings opacity. In the third essay, we examine the impact of banks’ bad times on the conservatism of accounting policy. Specifically, we investigate two types of bad times: banks’ own past experiences of undercapitalization and their experiences of witnessing the failures of other banks in state-wide and county-wide crises. We find that both types of banks’ bad times are positively related to timelier recognition of earnings decreases versus earnings increases in accounting income. We also find that following exposure to bad times, banks increase their allowance for loan losses. Collectively, our results suggest that bank-specific bad times and macro-level banking crises lead to greater bank accounting conservatism. These findings support the arguments that banks exposed to past crises overweight their bad time history, and become more cautious and pessimistic about their future earnings performance and loan quality.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Jin, Justin, Business.

▼ In this study, the continuous use of knowledge-based clinical decision support systems (KB-CDSS) is examined. KB-CDSS not only provides advice to clinicians, but also integrates guidelines with patient information and provides clinicians with tools that facilitate the application of guidelines in patient care. Studying KB-CDSS as a continuous application is important because continuity is a prerequisite to the success of KB-CDSS implementations and is considered as an important motivator for knowledge translation. Previous research in the area of health information systems (HIS) use has focused on the acceptance of these systems through the use of mostly information systems related constructs. Therefore, the theoretical models that explain the use of HIS have been limited and they obfuscated other phases of HIS such as continuous use. Moreover, extant research has not, to a large extent, considered the influence of KB-CDSS use on knowledge translation, the application of clinical guidelines in practice. This study seeks to fill these gaps in the literature by first integrating context-related factors with IS factors. This supports the study of antecedents of continuous use of KB-CDSS systems, exploring the relationship between continuous use and knowledge translation, and exploring changes in system dynamics (how usage patterns change with time). In order to achieve these research objectives, a literature review of healthcare and IS research was conducted, resulting in a comprehensive theoretical model that explains the antecedents of continuous use and its relationship to knowledge translation. To validate this model, data were collected from different sources, including: A questionnaire deployed to 118 physicians using the McMaster Pain Assistant KB-CDSS in three academic clinics in South Western Ontario, followed by five focus groups to further explain the context of using the systems and antecedents of its use, and the analysis of system use through data obtained from system logs and patient charts. The findings of this study show that: (i) Threats to physician professional identity surpasses intention to continue using KB-CDSS, thus influencing its use by physicians in the first six months; (ii) The relationships between factors influencing continuous system use change with time; (iii) System use has a strong relationship with knowledge translation after 6 months of use, but this relationship diminishes after 12 months of use; and (iv) How patients are affected by the system positively influences physician satisfaction with the system and hence their use of the system. This study helps in explaining the theory of physicians’ continuous use of KB-CDSS and how the antecedents of use change with time. Methodologically, this study has discovered several techniques that can be used to improve HIS research and physician acceptance of IS methods. Finally, in practice this study presents several suggestions for improving the development and deployment of KB-CDSS to enhance its use during the knowledge translation… Advisors/Committee Members: Tan, Joseph, Business.

▼ This thesis examines three important topics in empirical finance: The nonparametric conditional beta, the propagation of risks between markets, and the predictability of the market return density using economics and financial variables. First, I introduce a model that links the conditional beta to the second order conditional moments of returns. A key insight of my approach is that if the joint distribution of stock returns and market returns are correctly specified, then it follows that their contemporaneous pricing relationship is completely determined by the associated conditional distribution. The model that I propose is able to study the effects of a big shock in the market on the beta of an individual stock or a portfolio. This approach allows the beta to be a flexible function of the sign and size of the market portfolio which is absent in the finance literature. My results demonstrate that beta does depend on the market portfolio in a nonlinear manner. This carries implications for systematic risk measurement significantly different than what we have in a fixed parametric model. My model nests the Gaussian and Student-t distribution as special cases but importantly allows for deviations from the elliptic family of distributions. This includes asymmetric distributions. I extend the model to include more assets and provide a test to see if other factors are priced. My empirical results illustrate that in the event of big shocks in the market the firm's beta coefficient can go down or shoot up, depending on the market conditions (volatility). Second, I extend the literature on the spillover effects or contagion effects that focus on the transmission of shocks through moments to spillover effects on the conditional density and seek to shed greater light on the contemporaneous information transmission between markets. The objective is to develop a joint model of returns on two different markets governed by an in infinite mixture model from which the conditional density of the first market given the returns of the other market can be derived. This enables us to study how a shock in one market influences the contemporaneous and future (one-day-ahead, one-week-ahead, and one-month ahead) conditional density of the other market. This makes it possible to explore the contemporaneous spillover effects of big shocks in one market on various features of the density of the other market such as conditional expected return, volatility, skewness and kurtosis, and value at risk. Third, I investigate the predictability of the market return density using financial and macroeconomic variables. The objective is to develop a Bayesian nonparametric model of the distribution of market returns where the weights of the mixture change over time. Available information on financial and macroeconomic variables is employed to predict the weights of the mixture components in the predictive density of market returns over time. This permits the density of market returns to be unknown and to change over time. Moreover, the proposed model… Advisors/Committee Members: Maheu, John, Business Administration.

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Data Analytics (DA) has been blamed for contributing to discriminatory managerial decisions in organizations. To date, most studies have focused on the technical antecedents of such discriminations. As a result, little is known about how to ameliorate the problem by focusing on the human aspects of decision making when using DA in organizational settings. This study represents an effort to address this gap. Drawing on the cognitive elaboration model of ethical decision-making, construal level theory, and the literature on moral intensity, this study investigates how the availability and the design of demographic transparency (a form of decisional guidance) can lower DA users’ likelihood of agreement with discriminatory recommendations of DA tools. In addition, this study examines the role of user’s mindfulness and organizational ethical culture on this process. In an experimental study users interact with a DA tool that provides them with a discriminatory recommendation. The results confirm that demographic transparency significantly impacts both recognition of the moral issue at hand and perceived proximity toward the subject of the decision, which in turn help decrease the likelihood of users’ approval of the discriminatory recommendation. Moreover, the results suggest that user’s mindfulness and organizational ethical culture enhance the positive impacts of demographic transparency.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Hassanein, Khaled, Business.

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Social commerce has emerged as a new platform that enables users to conduct shopping assisted by inputs from other members and to publicly comment on transactions or products. It therefore adds a social aspect to traditional online commerce environments. Nevertheless, the role of the social facet embedded in such transactions in influencing user behaviors is not fully understood. In this dissertation, I develop three empirical studies to better understand social commerce user behaviors and to specifically consider the biasing factors that exist in these social platforms and can skew user rational decision-making. The results of these studies highlight the importance of social context in influencing users’ behaviors. The first study’s results show the role of interactions among social commerce users in affecting users’ decisions. The second study shows that like most of social networking sites; the use of social commerce platforms are prone to become habitual. Furthermore, this study shows how the developed habit among users can influence their rational purchasing decision. Finally, the third study explores the role of group identification and it shows that social identity that will be developed among members can cause some bias and skew the rational behaviors of users.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Yuan, Yufei, Business.

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Information security has been a crucial strategic issue in organizational management. Information security management (ISM) is a systematic process of effectively coping with information security threats and risks in an organization, through the application of a suitable range of physical, technical or operational security controls, to protect information assets and achieve business goals. There is a strong need for rigorous qualitative and quantitative empirical studies in the field of organizational information security management in order to better understand how to optimize the ISM process. Applying critical success factors approach, this study builds a theoretical model to investigate main factors that contribute to ISM success. The following tasks were carried out: (1) identify critical success factors of ISM performance; (2) build an ISM success model and develop related hypotheses; (3) develop construct measures for critical success factors and ISM performance evaluations; (4) collect data from the industry through interviews and surveys; and (5) empirically verify the model through quantitative analysis. The proposed theoretical model was empirically tested with data collected from a survey of managers who were presently involved with decision making regarding their company's information security (N=219). Overall, the theoretical model was successful in capturing the main antecedents of ISM performance. The results suggest that with business alignment, organizational support, IT competences, and organizational awareness of security risks and controls, information security controls can be effectively developed, resulting in successful information security management. This study contributes to the advancement of the information security management literature by (1) proposing a theoretical model to examine the effects of critical organizational success factors on the organization’s ISM performance, (2) empirically validating this proposed model, (3) developing and validating an ISM performance construct, and (4) reviewing the most influential information security management standards and trying to validate some basic guidelines of the standard.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis addresses three research questions: (1) How to measure ISM performance? (2) What are the critical factors that must be present to make ISM effective? And, (3) how do these factors contribute to the success of ISM? To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, this is the first known study to empirically investigate the most important factors for ISM success and their impact on ISM performance. This study contributes to the advancement of the information security management literature by (1) proposing a theoretical model to examine the effects of critical organizational success factors on the organization’s ISM performance, (2) empirically validating this proposed model, (3) developing and validating an ISM performance construct, and (4) reviewing the most influential information security management standards and…

Advisors/Committee Members: Yuan, Yufei, Business.

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This thesis examines important topics in corporate cash holdings and forecaster overconfidence. First, I provide an in-depth study of the interaction between intra-industry contagion risk and cash holdings. I develop a novel measure of a firm’s exposure to contagion risk that builds on the firm’s stock return comovement with other industry participants and separates contagion and competition effects caused by the expected financial distress of its industry peers. I show that high contagion-risk firms hold more cash because they face higher costs of external finance due to the potential decrease in their collateral values and the increased likelihood of their future financial distress caused by the net contagion effect. Second, in a co-authored paper with Drs. Jiaping Qiu and Chi Wan, we conduct a cross-country analysis to examine how financial development affects the reliance of corporate liquidity management on tangible capital. We find that financial development and better institutions lower the cash-tangibility sensitivity. This supports the view that financial development reduces the collateral role of tangible assets, thereby relaxing financial constraints of firms with low asset tangibility. This provides further firm-level evidence and sheds new light on the link between financial development and economic growth, as financial development promotes more efficient allocations of economic resources and hence facilitates investments and economic growth. Third, in a co-authored paper with Drs. Richard Deaves and Michael Schröder, we document using the ZEW panel of German stock market forecasters that weak forecasters tend to be overconfident in the sense that they provide extreme forecasts and their confidence intervals are less likely to contain eventual realizations. Moderate filters based on forecast accuracy over short rolling windows are somewhat successful in improving predictability. While poor performance can be due to various factors, a filter based on a prior tendency to provide extreme forecasts also improves predictability.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Deaves, Richard, Business.

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In this thesis, we focus on the applications of incentive mechanism design in operations and supply chain management (OSCM). Most significant – and interesting – topics arising in OSCM are concerned with the management of relationships among supply chain members under asymmetric information. Since the incentive mechanism design based on the principal-agent model deals with asymmetric information in a satisfactory way, it has become an important tool in investigating OSCM-related asymmetric information problems. We start with an introduction in Chapter 1. In this chapter, we briefly describe the theory of incentive mechanism design and its applications to OSCM, and the organization structure of this thesis. In Chapter 2, we study the optimal wage scheme and effort level in a contracting problem where both the principal and the agent are risk-averse. This chapter is a starting point for analyzing the buyer's optimal ordering decision and incentives for yield improvement in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 investigates the buyer's optimal ordering decision and incentives for yield improvement in the setting of random yield for the critical component and uncertain demand for the finished product. In Chapter 4, we assume the supplier's effort and yield become continuous and study a continuous optimization problem where the buyer decides the optimal order quantities and incentives for yield improvement under random demand. Our thesis ends with a conclusion and addresses the future research in Chapter 5.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Parlar, Mahmut, Business.

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In this dissertation, we study several stochastic capacity expansion models in the presence of permanent, spot market, and contract capacity for acquisition. Using a scenario tree approach to handle the data uncertainty of the problems, we develop multi-stage stochastic integer programming formulations for these models. First, we study multi-period single resource stochastic capacity expansion problems, where different sources of capacity are available to the decision maker. We develop efficient algorithms that can solve these models to optimality in polynomial time. Second, we study multi-period stochastic network capacity expansion problems with different sources for capacity. The proposed models are NP-hard multi-stage stochastic integer programs and we develop an efficient, asymptotically convergent approximation algorithm to solve them. Third, we consider some decomposition algorithms to solve the proposed multi-stage stochastic network capacity expansion problem. We propose an enhanced Benders' decomposition algorithm to solve the problem, and a Benders' decomposition-based heuristic algorithm to find tight bounds for it. Finally, we extend the stochastic network capacity expansion model by imposing budget restriction on permanent capacity acquisition cost. We design a Lagrangian relaxation algorithm to solve the model, including heuristic methods to find tight upper bounds for it.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Huang, Kai, Business.

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The broad purpose of this dissertation is to enhance the quality of managerial decisions through evidence-based management. Specifically, it raises three key questions: What is evidence? What are the attributes of knowledge that can facilitate informed decision making? How can such knowledge be generated? To answer these questions this thesis proposes a theory of evidence, suggesting that the strength of evidence is contingent upon its methodological fit, contextuality, transparency, replicability, and consensus. A model of evidence-based decision making is offered that explores how managers’ judgment, experience, and personal values along with the values of other stakeholders, contextual factors, and ethical constraints, may affect the decision process. Moreover, this thesis argues that in order to foster evidence-based management practice we need knowledge that is rigorous, relevant and actionable. To this end, a theory of actionability is proposed, and an empirical study is conducted to determine the attributes of actionable management knowledge. Based on the study, an actionability index is suggested. Evidence that is actionable requires sustainable collaborative effort to produce, curate and communicate. To accomplish that a theory of evidence-based collaboration is proposed. This theory conceives the collaboration as an independent organization that oversees the process of bringing rigour, relevance, and actionability together, and provides an interactive platform for producers, arbiters and users of management knowledge to communicate and collaborate. A template, guided by the theory of collaboration, is designed to produce systematic reviews that are useful for management practice.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Baba, Vishwanath, Business.

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The quantity and variety of product information available online today has increased significantly in recent years. This situation has exacerbated user information overload perceptions and made it difficult for online shoppers to choose between various online products and services. This is especially true for older adults, who typically have limitations in cognitive abilities due to the natural aging process and, as such, may perceive additional difficulties processing large amounts of information online. In response, Recommendation Agents (RAs) have become popular as decision support tools for online consumers in general, and older adults in particular. However, in the information systems literature, there is a lack of understanding regarding the design of RAs to suit the needs of different segments of the population, including older adults. Grounded in the theory of planned behaviour, and the “aging and IS adoption” literatures, this study investigates the impact of cognitive age and RA comprehensiveness on user perceptions towards the complexity of the input and output stages of an RA, and their subsequent impact on the antecedents of a user’s intention to utilize the RA for online shopping. This experimental study finds that: (i) an individual’s cognitive age significantly increases perceived RA input and output complexity perceptions; (ii) higher levels of RA comprehensiveness increases a user’s RA input and output complexity perceptions significantly; (iii) RA output complexity plays a more critical role than RA input complexity in shaping user perceptions of the overall complexity of an RA; and, (iv) increased levels of RA comprehensiveness increases individual perceptions of RA usefulness. Additionally, and as expected, cognitive age moderates the relationship between RA comprehensiveness and input/output complexity such that the effect is stronger for older adults. Surprisingly, however, cognitive age also moderates the relationship between RA comprehensiveness and perceived RA usefulness such that it is stronger for older adults. Theoretically, this study helps us to better understand how different levels of RA comprehensiveness, in terms of both the input and output stages of the RA operation, impact the intention of users of different cognitive ages to use online RAs. For practitioners, the results highlight the importance of customizing the design of RAs, in both their input and output stages, for consumers with different cognitive ages.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Hassanein, Khaled, Business.

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Collectivism refers to a tendency to value group membership and collective responsibility. Much of what we know about how collectivism influences team effectiveness is drawn from research that has assumed collectivism to be determined by either cultural contexts (e.g., Hofstede, 1980), or individual differences (e.g., Triandis, Leung, Villareal, & Clack, 1985). Based largely in social psychology, another perspective is emerging in which collectivism is viewed as a group norm within a team. The issue of collectivistic group norms within teams has yet to be examined in relation to team effectiveness outcomes, and may help to explain phenomena that have yet to be fully explained by cultural contexts or individual differences. In a longitudinal study of 60 self-managing teams performing a human resources management simulation, collectivistic group norms was positively associated with collective efficacy and team performance after controlling for the individual difference measure of psychological collectivism. Although psychological collectivism was positively associated with collectivistic group norms, only the two psychological collectivism sub-dimensions of concern and norm acceptance were positively associated with collectivistic group norms while no associations were found between collectivistic group norms and the remaining three sub-dimensions of preference, reliance, and goal priority. Collective efficacy fully mediated the association between collectivistic group norms and team performance. Collectivistic group norm sharedness moderated the associations between collectivistic group norms and collective efficacy, and collectivistic group norms and team performance. This study is among the first to introduce collectivistic group norms to the organizational behaviour literature and to use collectivistic group norm sharedness to account for unique variance in collective efficacy and team performance.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Tasa, Kevin, Business Administration.

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This research explores hacker motivation, demotivation and task selection through the lenses of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and General Deterrence Theory (GDT). The research also explores how context surrounding individual and task characteristics affects a hacker’s decision making process in selecting a hacking task. To build a solid foundation on which to understand and combat threats to information systems, researchers need to look past the technical issues of data security and explore why hackers do what they do. This research addresses this gap by understanding why hackers identify and assess hacking tasks. It is hoped that by investigating the motivations of these highly skilled Information Systems (IS) users, new insights into how to avoid becoming a hacker target might be developed. Participants in this study were individuals who self-identify as hackers. They completed a survey to validate the proposed model and answered open-ended questions to provide further insights. The quantitative data was analysed using Structured Equation Modelling; classical content analysis was conducted to examine the qualitative data. This research was successful in identifying the role of TRA and GDT in hacker task selection. The research confirmed the importance of mastery, curiosity, and task complexity in a hacker's evaluation process and provided enticing clues for further research into the role of task complexity in a hacker’s task evaluation process. The research also confirmed that subjective norms play an important part in shaping behavioural intentions towards engaging in a hacking task. Additionally, a clear linkage was identified between perceived certainty of sanction and behavioural intention. Contributions of this research to both academia and practice are outlined as well as potential limitations and areas for future research.

Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research explores hacker motivation, demotivation and task selection through the lenses of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and General Deterrence Theory (GDT). The research also explores how context surrounding individual and task characteristics affects a hacker’s decision making process in selecting a hacking task. To build a solid foundation on which to understand and combat threats to information systems, researchers need to look past the technical issues of data security and explore why hackers do what they do. This research addresses this gap by understanding why hackers identify and assess hacking tasks. It is hoped that by investigating the motivations of these highly skilled Information Systems (IS) users, new insights into how to avoid becoming a hacker target might be developed. Participants in this study were individuals who self-identify as hackers. They completed a survey to validate the proposed model and answered open-ended questions to provide further insights. The quantitative data was analysed using Structured Equation Modelling; classical content analysis was conducted to examine the qualitative data. …

Advisors/Committee Members: Head, Milena, Business Administration.

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Title: Information Systems Security Misbehaviour in the Workplace: The Effects of Job Performance Expectation and Workgroup Norm, Author: Ken Huijin Guo, Location: Mills

Information systems (IS) security has become a major current issue for organizations. It is generally understood that not only technology but also human factors and control processes have a significant impact on organizational IS security. One of the major human factors issues is end user behavior towards IS security. End users may ignore security measures and by doing so they inadvertently put the organization's information at risk. This study investigated why end users engage in such "security misbehavior" (SMB). Based on Eagly and Chaiken's composite behavioral model, an SMB model was proposed and tested empirically with data collected from a survey of computer end users in the workplace (N=306). Overall, the theoretical model was successful in capturing the main antecedents of end user SMB intention. Both attitude towards SMB and workgroup norm were found to have significant positive influences on SMB intention. In tum, attitude towards SMB is positively influenced by workgroup norm and job performance expectation. Contrary to the hypotheses of the model, however, user attitude towards the target (attitude towards security policy) and several utilitarian outcome expectations (perceived security risk, perceived accountability, and sanction certainty) did not have significant influences on end user attitudes towards SMB. However, asymmetric effects were discovered among these variables. Furthermore, the influences of self-identity outcome expectation (perceived identity match) on both attitude towards SMB and behavioral intention were not significant. The results also indicated that end user SMB intentions are to some extent dependent on the context. In sum, the findings suggest that job performance expectation and workgroup norm are key determinants and have strong direct and indirect effects on user SMB intention.

Thesis

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Advisors/Committee Members: Yuan, Yufei, Business Administration.

▼  Business process redesign (BPR) has been studied extensively since its initial widespread application in the late 1980s. Although a great deal has been learned by both practitioners and researchers about the best ways to use BPR for business process improvement, the overall failure rate of BPR projects is still reported to be high. This failure rate indicates that there is still a need for a comprehensive success factor model, validated with empirical evidence, to provide direction to practitioners that will help to improve the outcomes of business process redesign projects. Up to this point, few studies have identified and empirically tested the possible facilitators of BPR project success. This is an exploratory study, where Social-Technical Theory was applied in the context of BPR project implementation to explain the impact of success factors on BPR project success. The proposed conceptual research model includes the following factors: BPR project champion, top management support, change management, process redesign, and Information and Communication Technology Infrastructure (ICTI) improvement. The model considers critical factors from both the social and technical aspects of BPR project practices and the relationships among them. Facets of BPR project outcomes, including operational quality improvement, organizational quality improvement, cost savings, and productivity, were also examined. A survey of 145 managers and executives from medium and large-sized companies was used to validate the model. The results show that a BPR project champion is a critical success factor for BPR project success, mediated through top management support, and that top management support must be emphasized through the whole BPR project implementation procedure. More specifically, change management has a better likelihood of success if it is strongly supported by top management, while other factors play an important role in helping to encourage process redesign and ICTI improvements. This study also shows that three BPR project implementation components: change management, process redesign, and information and communications technology infrastructure (ICTI) improvement, are all critical to BPR project success. However, change management occupies the most important position because it impacts significantly the success of all four facets of BPR project outcomes (operational quality improvement, organizational quality improvement, cost savings, and productivity). Among these outcomes, the study showed that productivity is no longer the top focus of companies; instead, operational quality and organizational quality have become more important. This study makes a significant contribution to both theory and practice. The establishment of a BPR project implementation model based on socio-technical theory, and the development of new instruments for change management and process redesign, provide a foundation for future BPR project research. With respect to practice,… Advisors/Committee Members: Archer, Norm, Business Administration.

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With the rise of globalization, international assignments and multicultural teams, managing cultural diversity has become essential to organizations. As managing cultural diversity in team work has historically been a challenge (Earley & Gibson , 2002), academics and practitioners have directed resources toward enhancing understanding of how best to manage team diversity and improve effectiveness of international assignments (Tsui et al, 2007). Cultural Intelligence (CQ) is the abi lity to behave effectively in culturally diverse situations (Earley & Ang, 2003). Theory and research suggest that cultural diversity within teams often relate negatively to team member experiences of team processes, thereby negatively impacting team outcomes. The current study relies on similarity/attraction theory (Byrne, 1971 ), social identification theory (Turner, 1982) and self-categorization theory (Turner. 1982) to evaluate the relationship between cultural diversity and team processes (cohesion , participation, relationship and task conflict) and team outcomes (performance and satisfaction). The moderating effect of Cultural Intelligence on the relationship between cultural diversity and team processes was also explored. Data were collected from fourth year business school students working in teams of four to six to manage a virtual company competing with other teams in a stimulated market. A significant negative relationship was found between cultural diversity and team cohesion and participation; and a significant positive relationship was noted between cultural diversity and both team relationship conflict and task conflict. Furthermore, team satisfaction correlated positively with team cohesion and negatively with both types of team conflict while team performance was unrelated to team cultural diversity and perceptions of team processes. Finally, team members' CQ positively moderated the relationship between team cultural diversity and team processes (cohesion, participation and relationship conflict), where the team was comprised of two different cultures only. Where teams were comprised of members from more than two cultural groups, the moderation was negative.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Hackett, Rick, Business Administration.

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This dissertation aims to advance empirical research in the realm of knowledge sharing in virtual communities and to help practitioners better understand the factors that inhibit (cost) or motivate (benefit) such behaviour. The impact of some costs and benefits (factors derived from social exchange theory) may be contingent upon certain social contexts or conditions (factors derived from social capital theory). To this end, two research models were developed (i.e., a main effects model and an interaction model) that integrate these two theories together. New constructs specific to the virtual community context were also incorporated. To test these models, an online survey was administered to 968 members of a large IT professional virtual community comprising millions of registered users. Findings from a structural equation modeling analysis of this data set suggest that specific benefits and social capital factors have direct effects on an individual's intention to share knowledge, and more importantly, the impacts of some benefits are contingent upon certain social capital factors. Specifically, the impact of online score rewards on an individual's intention to share knowledge with others in the virtual community is contingent upon that person's trust in the people who are seeking knowledge from that individual. Additionally, the impact of reciprocity on an individual's intention to share knowledge is moderated by pro-sharing norms in the virtual community. A major contribution of this dissertation is the provision of new theoretical insights that help explain how certain benefits and social capital factors affect knowledge sharing activity in virtual communities. It is hoped that these insights will help builders and managers of knowledge-based virtual communities better promote online knowledge sharing behaviours and improve the sustainability of such communities in the future.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Detlor, Brian, Business Administration.

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Supply chain management has been one of the most important issues in manufacturing industries. In order to improve customer satisfaction, suppliers usually extend their inbound production operations to outbound logistics operations. To improve the overall operational performance, it is necessary to study scheduling models which consider inbound production and outbound deliveries simultaneously. This thesis deals with supply chain problems on the operational level using deterministic models. Meeting due dates is always one of the most important concerns in scheduling and supply chain management. In most supplying contracts, customers require that suppliers either meet contracted due dates or pay tardiness penalties. In order to save delivery costs, suppliers usually deliver jobs in batches. Therefore, we will study supply chain scheduling problems with delivery costs, where our goal is to minimize the sum of the weighted number of tardy jobs and the batch-delivery costs on a single machine. In traditional manufacturing system, due dates are not considered as given by exogenous decisions. In modern supply chains, however, due dates are determined by taking into account the system's ability to meet the assigned due dates, which can be quoted with certain costs. Therefore, we will study supply chain scheduling problems with delivery costs and due date assignment, where our goal is to minimize the sum of the weighted number of tardy jobs, the due-date-assignment costs and the batch-delivery costs on a single machine. As we know, most machine scheduling models are intractable in terms of computational complexity. Therefore, for our above problems, which are even harder, we first prove their computational complexity. Then we propose pseudo-polynomial algorithms for optimal solutions. For some problems, the pseudo-polynomial algorithms perform in polynomial time for some special cases. Finally, we develop efficient approximation algorithms or fully polynomial time approximation schemes, which can be implemented easily in practice.

Thesis

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advisors/Committee Members: Steiner, George, Business Administration.